AfterDawn: News

DivX Networks goes Hollywood?

According to DivX Networks' president, Shahi Gharman, the company which makes the video codec so often associated with online movie piracy, is about to sign deals with two major movie studios by the end of the year to offer their content in DivX-encoded format for on-demand online video service.

According to Gharman, movie studios are interested of the technology, which is already available in 20M non-PC devices worldwide, as an alternative to Microsoft's Windows Media platform.



DivX Networks, even though its reputation as a codec of choice for movie pirates (well, at least earlier on, before XviD and eventually DVDR took over), has actually worked on digital rights management system for quite some time now and it is obvious that studios are looking for DRM-locked solutions rather than non-restricted video formats to deliver their content for users.

Company also promised to deliver its upcoming version, DivX v6.0, by the end of this year, promising 33 percent better video compression rate than MPEG-4's most recent widely approved form, H.264. It is unclear how this affects on the fact that so far DivX 5.x series has been mostly MPEG-4 compliant and whether that will be the case in the future.

Source: News.com

Written by: Petteri Pyyny @ 27 Oct 2004 15:46

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• 2 comments

• JohnVa

  Fact 1: The lead developer of DivxNetworks, Gej, says Divx6 will be "better than Divx5. As good as AVC Base" : http://forum.doom9.org/showthread.php?s=&threadid=83372
  The H.264/AVC Baseline profile doesn't include b-frames or cabac-coding. So, DivX6 hardly will be 33% better than even H.264 Baseline, not to mention H.264 Main profile..
  Gej also said that DivX6 will be DivX certified compatible. If this means using the same old MPEG4 part2 technology, there's no way it can compete against good MPEG-4 part10/h.264 implementations.
  
  Fact 2: Hollywood with HD-DVD alliance and Blue-Ray group have already decided about the next generation formats. Those are H.264 and VC1. Not DivX.
  
  Fact 3: Marketing has no limits.

  28.10.2004 00:34 #1

• Ghostdog

  I´ve been out of the whole video encoding thing for awhile now, someone please enlighten me...
  
  What are the best codecs out there? Xvid beats DivX? By how much? Whose codec is H.264 and how good is it? Is it freely available or is it just used by movie studios and pro´s?

  3.11.2004 23:10 #2